Why was a “Pot Doesn’t Cause Cancer” study ignored? The annoying thing about science—as Richard Nixon learned when he ordered an investigation of marijuana risks back in 1972—is that sometimes it tells you things you don’t want to hear.

Why isn’t the war in Afghanistan over yet? We’ve been stuck there for over a decade now. The “good news” has been that the Pentagon announced last February that the cost of staying in Afghanistan was only $USD 5.3 billion a month for this fiscal year, down from $USD 7.8 billion a month for the previous fiscal year.

One factor is that the Taliban has a steady stream of funds from the opium trade, for brokering the trade and providing “protection” to farmers and smugglers. Afghanistan grows on the order of 90% of the world’s supply.

Why are poppies the go-to cash crop in Afghanistan? Well, according to a joint U.N./Afghanistan government report, there’s a lot of poverty, opium makes lot of profit, it provides good returns for small plots of land and raw opium is compact and keeps well in a region with poor transportation. With dry opium fetching $USD 250/kilo (compared to $1.20/kilo for rice), it isn’t hard to see why it’s such a preferred crop. The only crops that even get close in that region are pomegranates, almonds and trellised grapes, all bulky, water intensive and hard to transport.

If a little opium happened to find its way to the illicit market it would be fetching top dollar, maybe even subsidizing efforts to build up civil society for a change. I mean, hey, the same sort of thing worked for the Contras, and I’m always more in favor of doing things that work rather than things that don’t.